The present invention relates to automated editing of multimedia content and more particularly to the removal of unnecessary portions of multimedia content.
In educating users of computer applications, it is common to produce screen capture tutorial multimedia content in which a demonstrator explains what they are doing as they use the computer application to carry out one or more actions. The screen capture tutorial multimedia content typically includes: (i) video captured from a display screen displaying the computer application being executed; and (ii) audio spoken by the demonstrator explaining what can be seen and/or what actions are being performed. During the process of recording the screen capture tutorial multimedia content, it is likely that the demonstrator will make mistakes that they wish to undo. For a viewer of the screen capture tutorial multimedia content, it is unlikely that watching these mistakes will be useful. The editor of the multimedia content is required to go through the multimedia content with the aim of removing those sections containing mistakes and which are not useful to the viewer.
Presently, this is done by an editor viewing all of the multimedia content after it has been recorded, and then manually editing out any sections containing mistakes. The main disadvantage of this approach is the time that it takes the editor to perform this operation. This disadvantage is particularly relevant when the editor is inexperienced or the multimedia content is particularly long.
As an example, a demonstrator is recording a tutorial on how to use the Eclipse integrated development environment to write Java code (Eclipse is a trademark of Eclipse Foundation, Inc. and Java is a trademark of Oracle, Inc). During the tutorial, the demonstrator accidentally creates a method that they did not need to create, so the demonstrator uses either the keyboard combination “Ctrl+Z” or the ‘undo’ button to undo the most recent change from the editor. The demonstrator then resumes their audio voice-over as if they had not made that mistake. In post-processing, the editor views the multimedia content to find the mistake, and then uses video editing software to remove that section of the multimedia content.